Franken attacks Comcast merger

The Minnesota Democrat, who pilloried the telecom giant and its plans to purchase Time Warner Cable at a congressional hearing Wednesday, continued his attack a day later — stressing in an interview that the $45.2 billion megadeal threatens competition and could spike consumers’ cable rates.

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But Comcast hasn’t exactly been shy about punching back. The telecom company revealed this week it had hired new outside lobbyists to join a government-relations army that numbers upwards of 100. And Comcast’s political machine already has spent big to tout the company’s latest business move, new federal records show.

“They’re swarming Capitol Hill [with] their lobbyists,” said Franken during a taping of C-SPAN’s “The Communicators,” moderated by POLITICO.

Asked during the interview what he’d do with Comcast’s merger, the senator added, “The first thing I would do is not let the largest cable TV company buy the second-largest cable TV company.”

It’s the FCC and the Justice Department, not Congress, that has the final say on the deal — a fact Franken acknowledged Thursday. But lawmakers have a critical role to play: Hearings, like the Senate Judiciary Committee’s gathering this week, are where both sides can duke it out in a public forum.

For that reason, Comcast has been especially active in trying to win new congressional allies. Early lobbying reports reveal the company in February and March spent at least $200,000 through five outside lobbying shops to talk to lawmakers about the merger. Final lobbying tallies for the first quarter of 2014 aren’t due until later this month.

Comcast also hired another set of lobbyists, this time through the Normandy Group, according to a federal filing posted online this week. The new pickup adds two former staff members for the House and Senate Judiciary committees to Comcast’s growing team. Last month, Comcast retained Bloom Strategic Counsel’s Seth Bloom, another Senate antitrust veteran.

Comcast’s high-powered lobbying offensive again could prove useful as the company prepares to return to the Hill in May, when the House Judiciary Committee will scrutinize the Time Warner Cable deal for the first time. Senate Judiciary aides say they might hold their second hearing in the coming months.

That means plenty of Hill clashes could be on the horizon — like the one between Franken and Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen during Wednesday’s hearing. During the C-SPAN appearance, Franken stood by his assertion that the Time Warner Cable deal would result in higher prices, both in cable and broadband, while empowering Comcast to bundle its services in a bid to boost its revenues.

“This is going to cost people in my state; it’s going to cost consumers more money,” the senator said. “We’ve seen the cost of your basic cable package, from 1995 to 2010, go up, and more than double inflation, and usually when the technology gets better and better and better, the price goes down.”

Cohen, at the hearing Wednesday, assured there’s “nothing in this transaction that will cause anyone’s cable prices to go up.” Asked about those comments the next day, Franken still expressed skepticism: “I don’t know how he says that, when one of his first phone calls about this he said prices might go up even faster than they had before. They can’t guarantee that.”

The senator also repeated his criticism that Comcast hadn’t kept some of the promises it made to federal regulators during the company’s 2011 purchase of NBCUniversal. Specifically, Franken said that Comcast hadn’t done enough to market its standalone broadband service to consumers. And he charged that Comcast had tried to shaft programmers like Bloomberg, which competes with Comcast’s own business offering, CNBC.

Comcast earlier this week maintained that it “kept the promises” it made during the NBC deal. “We’ve met or exceeded our commitments,” Cohen wrote in a blog posted as the company filed its official merger documents with the FCC. During the hearing, Cohen said the so-called “neighborhooding” fight with Bloomberg arose only because of uncertainty in the FCC’s initial consent decree.

“There were then 147 conditions that there have been absolutely no issue with — so the vast overwhelming majority there have been zero issues,” Cohen also noted in his prepared testimony.